


Familiar Faces

by Setcheti



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 13:11:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4436735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't exactly what he’d pictured when he’d been told he’d be traveling on an ocean liner.  And he'd never expected to see someone he recognized.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiar Faces

**Author's Note:**

> I have a love/hate relationship with Twin Peaks: I loved it, but the final episode sucked donkey balls. I did come up with a fix for it, though, which was then eaten by a corrupted file which I never was able to fix to get it back. This short is somewhat set in my fix universe, where ex-Agent Cooper was rescued from the Red Room, stayed in Twin Peaks, and became Sheriff Cooper.

Major Garland Briggs tucked his pea coat in tighter around his body and frowned out at the gray, heaving waves and the drifting banks of cold, clingy fog. Not exactly what he’d pictured when he’d been told he’d be traveling on an ocean liner. Cruise ships in his own time were sunny floating playgrounds. This was…well, it was different. He’d expected the formality, the preoccupation with appearances and connections, the lack of amenities he was used to taking for granted. What he hadn’t expected was how glum the whole thing was, and how utterly boring he was finding it.

And to make it worse, he hadn’t even been on board a whole twenty-four hours yet.

Waves peaked and fell, peaked and fell. Briggs found them somewhat soothing to watch, as he’d seen the waves off the rocky Washington coast do much the same thing in the heavy gray hours before a storm blew in. Which was of course a bad thing out here, unlike at home where he could just retreat to the warm comfort of his house and let the storm come and go as it pleased without it having much effect on him. Out here, there was no place to retreat to when the winds and the rain and the ice fog came; the ship was at the mercy of the storm and the sea, and she would ride or sink as those two forces willed.

He turned away from the rail abruptly. It wouldn’t do to get caught up in such depressing thoughts, to let himself be distracted by the odd mood on board the ship. He had a job to do once the ship made port, which supposedly would be in three or four days, although with the weather looking the way it did he doubted it would be less than a week. But still, he had a job to do, and he needed to be thinking about how he was going to go about accomplishing it and how he could overcome any obstacles that might fall into his path. Brooding now could be detrimental to his wellbeing later.

He wasn’t going to admit that he was tired. He’d passed sixty a few years back, and the missions weren’t as easy to recover from as they once had been. He was the only one left who could run them now, though; they’d tried the Manhattan process on some other soldiers, a few years ago, and the only one who hadn’t gone insane had died before he’d even fully resolidified. Briggs had had hopes, once upon a time, that his son Robert would follow in his footsteps, but those hopes had never materialized. His superiors had offered to conscript Robert once, to pull him out of prison and into the project, but Briggs had vetoed it. His son would have been a danger to the project – meaning he would have been a danger to the whole world, even to existence as they knew it. Robert had inherited his father’s strategic mind, but not his moral compass.

But now wasn’t the time to be thinking about Robert, either.

Briggs considered returning to his cabin and decided against it. With the storm blowing up on them, he had no doubt that he and the other passengers would soon be restricted to their cabins; he’d get enough of four walls then. So he walked around the deck he was on, and then mounted the stairs to the upper deck and walked around that one too. Normally passengers weren’t allowed on the upper deck, but his rank gave him privileges, even here. He stopped for a word with some officers taking air in front of the wheelhouse, and then wandered back to the rail when they went back inside, giving a wave to the captain when he saw the man looking out the window. A good man, the captain. Former Navy, retired, but hadn’t felt like giving up the sea just yet. Briggs sympathized with him, he himself wasn’t ready to give up the air just yet either – no matter how tired he was.

There was a small private deck a few steps down from the upper one, isolated and very much out of the way of the rest of the passengers, so Briggs was surprised when he went down to it and found someone already there ahead of him. It was a man, not one of the sailors by his outfit, and he was sitting in on one of the small deck’s two benches, reading a book. The man looked up before he could retreat quietly, and the major sucked in a shocked breath. He knew this man.

Apparently the man had recognized him as well, because his narrow face brightened with a smile of recognition. “Why hello, Major,” he said. “I’d say I’m surprised to see you here, but that wouldn’t be entirely truthful of me.”

Briggs was stunned almost into speechlessness. “D…Agent Cooper?”

The man nodded. “That’ll work. They do think I’m a Pinkerton agent, hence my being allowed to take my ease on the private deck – a privilege I’d assume you were about to enjoy as well.” He cocked his head, dark eyes inquisitive. “You didn’t know I’d be here?”

“No, no I did not.” Briggs gathered his composure back up. “Pardon me being blunt, but what the devil are you doing here?”

The younger man shrugged and lifted his book. “Reading. A most fascinating treatise about Tibet, written by a man who had never been there but who’d had a good many interesting conversations with people who claimed they had. I’m rather tempted to go there myself, if I have the time, and then write a book of my own.”

Briggs nodded, and moved to lean against the rail – but not in such a way that he would be at a disadvantage if something happened. Which he halfway suspected might happen, since the last time he’d seen Dale Cooper had been a few days and a double-handful of decades ago at the diner in the town where Briggs lived and Cooper was the sheriff. Ex-FBI agent or not, the younger man being here made no sense – and things that made no sense usually turned out to be dangerous. He decided to prod a little. “So you’re on vacation?”

“About the same way you are.” Cooper smiled at him, a little twinkle of amusement in his eyes. With the dark suit and coat he was wearing he looked very like he had years ago when Briggs had first met him, back when he’d been a young, overly earnest federal agent sent to investigate an odd murder in their small Washington town – but then, the man had never changed that much, and had always seemed to age very slowly as compared to what Briggs saw in his own mirror every day. “Getting off at the next port?”

“I have some business to take care of there.” Briggs wasn’t going to elaborate any more than that. “Yourself?”

“I’ll stay on board until we reach London,” was the casual answer. “I’m…meeting a friend there, and then we’ll have business of our own to take care of.”

Briggs nodded again, straightening away from the rail with a smile. “I’m glad to hear that you’ll have more of a vacation than I will. Perhaps before I leave the ship we can have dinner together, catch up on things.”

“I would like that,” Cooper agreed quietly, and then settled back in, apparently ready to resume reading. “Good day, Major.”

“Agent Cooper,” Briggs replied, and then did the one thing he did not want to do and turned to walk up the steps to the upper deck. He was ready, though, when he heard the man behind him lunge forward, and he dodged the knife that had been aimed at his back and backhanded the slighter form away from him and into the rail. He was on the younger man before he could recover himself, using his greater mass and experience against the near-supernatural strength of his opponent and thanking God that he had protections against even things like this. He held the black-eyed creature wearing the face of his friend by the throat. “Going to go rip up the old town, were we… _Bob_?” he asked dryly. “You’re borrowing something that doesn’t belong to you, and I don’t appreciate it one little bit.”

The thing sneered at him, although it did shift to a different face – this time his son’s. “You can’t stop me.”

“I can certainly slow you down,” Briggs replied, and with a heave he threw the creature over the railing and watched it hit the icy water far below, screaming obscenities as it went. He did what was expected and yelled for help, telling the sailors who came running that there had been a young man on the bench when he’d come down, depressed and bemoaning himself over the loss of some girl’s affections, and that he’d thrown himself over the rail before Briggs could stop him. “He threw a knife at me, there,” he told them, pointing to the knife where it lay near the steps. He didn’t have to fake the look of sadness that crossed his face. “I’m not sure who he was, but he claimed you thought he was a Pinkerton agent…and he looked something like my son did as a young man.”

The captain was down by then, shaking his head over the addition of one more foolish ghost added to the sea’s stock, and he clapped Briggs on the shoulder and then took him up to his office for some brandy. The captain had a son as well, and it turned out the two military men had more in common than they might have imagined. So it was a pleasanter journey than Briggs had been anticipating, and once the ship made port he took his leave of the captain and made his way to the rendezvous point so he could go home, reflecting that it had been a rather nice vacation for him after all…especially since his mission had been accomplished on the very first day.


End file.
